MUIR GLACIER AND IDAHO INLET.
When Dick Willoughby told of the great glacier thirty miles up the bay,
the thud of whose falling ice could be heard and felt at his house, and
declared that it once rattled the tea-cups on his table, and sent a wave
washing high up on his shore, the captain of the _Idaho_ said he would
go there, and took this Dick Willoughby along to find the place and
prove the tale. Away we went coursing up Glacier Bay, a fleet of one
hundred and twelve little icebergs gayly sailing out to meet us, as we
left our anchorage the next morning. Entering into these unknown and
unsurveyed waters, the lead was cast through miles of bottomless
channels, and when the ship neared a green and mountainous island at the
mouth of the bay, the captain and the pilot made me an unconditional
present of the domain, and duly entered it on the ship’s log by name. It
is just off Garden Point, and for a summer resort Scidmore Island
possesses unusual advantages. Heated and suffering humanity is invited
to visit that emerald spot in latitude 58° 29´ north, and longitude 135°
52´ west from Greenwich, and enjoy the July temperature of 45°, the seal
and salmon fishing, the fine hunting, and the sight of one of the
grandest of the many great glaciers that break directly into the sea
along the Alaska coast.
The gray-green water, filled with sediment, told that glaciers were
near, and icebergs, from the size of a house down to the merest lumps,
circled around us, showing the ineffable shades of pale greens and
blues, and clinking together musically as the steamer passed by. The
tides rush fiercely in and out of Glacier Bay, and heavy fogs add to the
dangers of navigation, and Captain Beardslee and Major Morris, who
entered it in the little steamer Favorite in 1880, were obliged to put
back without making any explorations. The charts as they now appear are
very faulty, the sketches having been made from information given by Mr.
Willoughby and Indian seal hunters, and from brief notes furnished by
Professor Muir. At the head of every inlet around the great bay there
are glaciers, and Mr. Willoughby said that in five of these fiords there
are glaciers a mile and a half wide, with vertical fronts of seamed ice
rising two hundred and four hundred feet from the water. In one of them
a small island divides the ice cataract, and Niagara itself is repeated
in this glacial corner of the north. At low tide, bergs and great
sections of the fronts fall off into the water, and Glacier Bay is
filled with this debris of the glaciers, that floats out from every
inlet and is swept to and fro with the tides.
Dick Willoughby stood on the bridge with the navigators, and gave them
the benefit of his experience. After a while he came back to the group
of ladies on deck, and, sitting down, shook his head seriously and
said:—
“You ladies are very brave to venture up in such a place. If you only
knew the risks you are running—the dangers you are in!” And the
pioneer’s voice had a tone of the deepest concern as he said it.
We received this with some laughter, and expressed entire confidence in
the captain and pilot, who had penetrated glacial fastnesses and unknown
waters before. A naval officer on board echoed the Willoughby strain,
and declared that a commander would never attempt to take a man-of-war
into such a dangerous place, and deprecated Captain Carroll’s daring and
rashness. The merchant marine was able to retaliate when this naval
comment was repeated, and Glacier Bay was suggested as the safest place
for a government vessel’s cruise, on account of the entire absence of
schooners.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF THE MUIR GLACIER.]
The lead was cast constantly, and the _Idaho_ veered gracefully from
right to left, went slowly, and stopped at times, to avoid the ice floes
that bore down upon it with the outgoing tide. Feeling the way along
carefully, the anchor was cast beside a grounded iceberg, and the
photographers were rowed off to a small island to take the view of the
ship in the midst of that Arctic scenery. Mount Crillon showed his hoary
head to us in glimpses between the clouds, and then, rounding Willoughby
Island, which the owner declares is solid marble of a quality to rival
that of Pentelicus and Carrara, we saw the full front of the great Muir
Glacier, where it dips down and breaks into the sea, at the end of an
inlet five miles long.
The inlet and the glacier were named for Professor John Muir, the
Pacific coast geologist, who, as far as known, was the first white man
to visit and explore the glaciers of the bay. Professor Muir went up
Glacier Bay, with the Rev. S. Hall Young, of Fort Wrangell, as a
companion, in 1879. They travelled by canoe, and Professor Muir,
strapping a blanket on his back, and filling his pockets with hard tack,
started off unarmed, and spent days of glacial delight in the region.
These were the only white men who had preceded us, when Captain Carroll
took the _Idaho_ up the bay in 1883, on what was quite as good as a real
voyage of exploration.
Of all scenes and natural objects, nothing could be grander and more
impressive than the first view up the inlet, with the front of the great
glacier, the slope of the glacial field, and the background of lofty
mountains united in one picture. Mount Crillon and Mount Fairweather
stood as sentries across the bay, showing their summits fifteen thousand
feet in air, clear cut as silhouettes against the sky, and the stillness
of the air was broken only by faint, metallic, tinkling sounds, as the
ice floes ground together, and the waters washed up under the
honeycombed edges of the floating bergs. Steaming slowly up the inlet,
the bold, cliff-like front of the glacier grew in height as we
approached it, and there was a sense of awe as the ship drew near enough
for us to hear the strange, continual rumbling of the subterranean or
subglacial waters, and see the avalanches of ice that, breaking from the
front, rushed down into the sea with tremendous crashes and roars.
Estimates of the height of the ice cliff increased with nearness, and
from a first guess of fifty feet, there succeeded those of two hundred
and four hundred feet, which the authority of angles has since proven as
correct.
The _Idaho_ was but an eighth of a mile from the front of the glacier,
when the anchor was cast in eighty-four fathoms of water at low tide,
and near us, in the midst of these deep soundings, icebergs loaded with
boulders lay grounded, with forty feet of their summits above water.
Words and dry figures can give one little idea of the grandeur of this
glacial torrent flowing steadily and solidly into the sea, and the
beauty of the fantastic ice front, shimmering with all the prismatic
hues, is beyond imagery or description.
According to Professor Muir, the glacier measures three miles across the
snout, or front, where it breaks off into the sea. Ten miles back it is
ten miles wide, and sixteen tributary glaciers unite to form this one
great ice-river. Professor Muir ascended to the glacier field from the
north side, and, following its edges for six miles, climbed the high
mountain around which the first tributary debouches from that side. He
gives the distance from the snout of the glacier to its furthest source
in the great nève, or snow-fields, as forty miles. Detailed accounts of
Professor Muir’s canoe journeys in glacier land were given in his
letters to the San Francisco _Bulletin_, and they abound in the most
beautiful and poetic descriptions of the scenery. His paper on “The
Glaciation of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions, visited by the U. S. S.
_Corwin_ in the year 1881,” accompanies the report of Captain C. L.
Hooper, U. S. R. M., published by the government printing office at
Washington in 1885, and contains Professor Muir’s observations and
deductions upon the glaciation of the whole Pacific coast from
California to the Arctic.
No attempt has yet been made to measure the rate of progress of the Muir
glacier, although Captain Carroll has several times promised himself to
stake off and mark points on the main trunk, and note their positions
from month to month during the summer. Mr. Willoughby said that the
Indians told him that two years previously the line of the ice wall was
a half mile further down the inlet, and that in their grandfathers’ time
it extended as far as Willoughby Island, five miles below. The old
moraine that forms the bar at the mouth of the bay is sufficient
evidence to scientists that the ice sheet covered the whole bay within
what Professor Muir calls “a very short geological time ago.” The
Hooniah goat-hunters told Mr. Willoughby that the first tributary
glacier connected with the Davidson glacier in Lynn Canal, and that they
often made the journey across it to the Chilkat country. Kloh-Kutz told
Professor Davidson that it was a one day’s journey on snowshoes—about
thirty miles—over to this bay of great glaciers, and thirty days’
journey thence, through a region of high mountains and snow fields, to
the ocean at the foot of the Mount St. Elias Alps.
[Illustration: RIVER ON NORTH SIDE OF THE MUIR GLACIER.]
The vast, desolate stretch of gray ice visible across the top of the
serrated wall of ice that faced us had a strange fascination, and the
crack of the rending ice, the crash of the falling fragments, and a
steady undertone like the boom of the great Yosemite Fall, added to the
inspiration and excitement. There was something, too, in the
consciousness that so few had ever gazed upon the scene before us, and
there were neither guides nor guide books to tell us which way to go,
and what emotions to feel.
We left the stewards cutting ice from the grounded bergs near the ship,
and, putting off in the lifeboats, landed in the ravine on the north
side of the glacier. We scrambled over two miles of sand and boulders,
along the steep, crumbling banks of a roaring river, until we reached
the arch under the side of the glacier from which the muddy torrent
poured. Near that point, on the loose moraine at the side, there was the
remnant of a buried forest, with the stumps of old cedar-trees standing
upright in groups. They were stripped of their bark, and cut off six and
ten feet above the surface, and pieces of wood were scattered all
through the debris of this moraine. The disforesting of the shores of
Glacier Bay is the mystery that baffles Professor Muir, as on all this
densely wooded coast, this one bay lacks the thick carpet of moss and
the forests that elsewhere conceal the evidences of glacial action.
Patches of crimson epilobium covered the ground in spots, and flourished
among the boulders at the edge of the ice sheet, where only a thin layer
of dirt covers buried ice.
Reaching the sloping side of the ice-field, we mounted, and went down a
mile over the seamed and ragged surface towards the broken ice of the
water front. The ice was a dirty gray underfoot, but it crackled with a
pleasant mid-winter sound, and the wind blew keen and sharp from over
the untrodden miles of the glacier field. The gurgle and hollow roar of
the subterranean waters came from deep rifts in the broken surface, and
in the centre and towards the front of the glacier, the ice was tossed
and broken like the waves of an angry sea. The amateur photographers
turned their cameras to right and left, risked their necks in the deep
ravines and hollows in the ice, and climbed the surrounding points to
get satisfactory views. Every one gathered a pocketful of rounded rocks
and pebbles, and shreds of ancient cedar trees carried down by the ice
flood, and then, having worn rubber shoes and boots to tatters on the
sharp ice, and sunk many times in the treacherous glacier mud, we
reluctantly obeyed the steamer’s whistle and cannon-shot, and started
back to the boats.
A nearer sweep towards the long ice-cliff showed that the line of the
front was broken into bays and points, the middle of the glacier jutting
far out into the water, and the sides sweeping back in curves, as the
cliffs decreased in height, and finally sloped down to the level of the
side moraines. At points along the front, subterranean rivers boiled up,
and, in the deep blue crevasses, cascades ran down over icy beds. In the
full sunlight the front of the glacier was a dazzling wall of silver and
snowy ice, gleaming with all the rainbow colors, and disclosing fresh
beauties as each new crevasse or hollow came in sight.
[Illustration: GLACIER BAY. FRONT OF MUIR GLACIER.]
A magnificent sunset flooded the sky that night, and filled every icy
ravine with rose and orange lights. At the last view of the glacier, as
we steamed away from it, the whole brow was glorified and transfigured
with the fires of sunset; the blue and silvery pinnacles, the white and
shining front floating dreamlike on a roseate and amber sea, and the
range and circle of dull violet mountains lifting their glowing summits
into a sky flecked with crimson and gold.
It was a chill, misty morning, a year later, when the watch again
sighted “Scidmore Island, one mile off the starboard beam,” and its
long, green undulating shore was visible through the rain. Entering Muir
Inlet, the _Ancon_ went cautiously through the floating ice and anchored
in the curve of the south end of the glacier’s front, but a few hundred
yards from a long shelving beach that would have shone with its golden
sand in sunlight. There were the same deep soundings near the front, as
on the other side of the inlet, but the _Ancon’s_ anchor was dropped
nearer the moraine shore, where the lead gave only twenty-five fathoms.
Under the dull gray sky all dazzling effects of prismatic light were
lost, but the fretted and fantastic front showed lines and masses of the
purest white and an infinite range of blues. Avalanches of crumbling ice
and great pieces of the front were continually falling with the roar and
crash of artillery, revealing new caverns and rifts of deeper blue
light, while the spray dashed high and the great waves rolled along the
icy wall, and, widening in their sweep, washed the blocks of floating
ice up on the beaches at either side. The ship’s cannon was loaded and
fired twice point blank at the front of the glacier. The report was
followed by a second of silence, and then an echo came back that
intensified the first ring many times, and was followed by a long, sharp
roll as the echo was flung from cavern to cavern in the ice.
[Illustration: SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (TOP.)]
The small boats landed us on a beach strewn with ice cakes, and lines of
stranded shrimps marked the wash of the waves raised by the falling ice.
Some shrimps two and three inches long were found, but the most of them
were delicate little pink things not an inch in length. The crimson
epilobium blossoms nodded to us from every slope and hollow of the long
lateral moraine that lay between the water and the high mountain walls.
Over sand and boulders, and across a roaring stream that issued from the
side of the glacier, the pilgrims crept to the foot of the slope, and
then up a long incline of boulders and dirty ice to a first level where
they could look out over the frozen waste and across the broken front.
Deep crevasses seamed the ice plain in every direction, as on the north
side of the frozen river; but, although the view is not so extended as
on the other side, the level of the ice field is reached more easily,
and it is a steep but only a short climb up over the buried ice to the
top of the glacier. The treacherous gray glacier mud—“the mineral paste,
and mountain meal“ of Prof. Muir—engulfed one at every careless step,
and rocks would sink under one, and land even the high-booted pilgrims
knee-deep in the fine, sticky compound. A half-mile from what appeared
to be the bank of the frozen river, there was clear solid ice underlying
the rocks and mud, and occasionally caves in this side wall enticed the
breathless ones to rest themselves in the pale shadows of the glacier
ice. Fragments and rounded pebbles of red and gray granite, limestone,
marble, schistose slate, porphyry and quartz were picked up on the way,
and many of the bits of quartz and marble were deeply stained with iron.
The Polish mining engineer with the party assured us that all Glacier
Bay was rich in the indications of a great silver-belt, and held up
carbonates, sulphates, and sulphurets to prove his assertion.
From this south-side landing we easily approached the base of the ice
cliffs by following up the beach to the ravine that cut into the ice at
the edge of the moraine. We got a far better idea of the height and
solidity of the walls by standing like pigmies in the shadow of the
lofty front, and looking up to the grottoes and clefts in the cobalt and
indigo cliff. It was dry and firm on the beach, and the golden sand was
strewn with dripping bergs of sapphire and aquamarine that had been
swept ashore by the spreading waves. These huge blocks of ice on the
beach, that had looked like dice from the ship, were found to be thirty
and forty feet long and twenty feet high.
The nearer one approached, the higher the ice walls seemed, and all
along the front there were pinnacles and spires weighing several tons,
that seemed on the point of toppling every moment. The great buttresses
of ice that rose first from the water and touched the moraine were as
solidly white as marble, veined and streaked with rocks and mud, but
further on, as the pressure was greater, the color slowly deepened to
turquoise and sapphire blues. The crashes of falling ice were
magnificent at that point, and in the face of a keen wind that blew over
the ice-field we sat on the rocks and watched the wondrous scene. The
gloomy sky seemed to heighten the grandeur, and the billows of gray
mist, pouring over the mountains on either side, intensified the sense
of awe and mystery. The tide was running out all of the afternoon hours
that we spent there, and the avalanches of ice were larger and more
frequent all of the time. When the anchor was lifted, the ship took a
great sweep up nearer to the glacier’s front, and as we steamed away
there were two grand crashes, and great sections of the front fell off
with deafening roars into the water. We steamed slowly down the inlet,
and out into Glacier Bay, stopping, backing, and going at half speed to
avoid the floating ice all around us, that occasionally was ground and
crunched up by the paddle-wheels with a most uncomfortable sound. With
each thump from the ice, and the recurrence of the noise in the
paddle-box, and then the sight of some red slats floating off on the
water, Dick Willoughby’s concern was remembered; and the advantages of
the screw propeller, and the merits of the favorite and original
_Idaho_, were appreciated.
[Illustration: SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (FRONT.)]
While we cruised away in the mist and twilight, the children, who never
could be made to keep ordinary bedtime in that latitude, celebrated the
birthday of one of their number with high revel. While they danced
around the cake on the cabin table, and blew out the eight candles one
by one with an accompanying wish, the last boy wished that the happy
youngster might “celebrate many more birthdays in Glacier Bay,” and the
elders applauded him.
After the _Idaho_ had made its first visit to the Muir Glacier, and
returned Dick Willoughby to his Hooniah home and his strawberry farm, we
had a seven hours’ enforced anchorage, on the succeeding day, in a
narrow fiord on the north end of Chicagoff Island, which that same
Willoughby had described as an unknown channel, “a hole in the
mountain,” and a short cut to the open ocean, that he had travelled many
times himself. Following up his forty-fathom channel, the lead marked
shoaling waters, and before we knew it the _Idaho_ ran her nose on a
sloping bank, and stayed there until the returning tide floated her off.
There had not been a canoe in sight, nor a sign of life along the shores
all that morning, but the ship’s officers had hardly settled the fact
that they were hard aground before several canoes were seen in the wake,
and the gangway was surrounded with bargaining Hooniahs, who held up
furs, baskets, and trophies for us to buy. More and more of them came
paddling down the narrow lane of emerald water, and family groups in red
blankets were soon at home around blazing camp fires on the narrow
ledges of the shore, and added greatly to the picturesqueness of the
scene. Of all the little fiords we had been into, this one was the most
beautiful, and even Naha Bay cannot surpass it. The narrow channel has
steep, wooded hills on either side, and a rugged, snow-covered mountain
stands sentry at the head of the fiord, and the clear, green water was
so still that every tree and twig was clearly reflected; the ship rested
double, and the breasts of the soaring eagles were mirrored in all the
shadings of their plumage. The silence was profound, and every voice or
sound on deck was echoed from the mountains, and could be heard for a
long distance up the inlet. Had it not been for the Hooniah canoes
following so promptly, we might have supposed ourselves explorers, who
had penetrated into some enchanted region, or dreamers who were seeing
this beautiful valley in a strange sleep. It was exploration to the
extent that all our course up the inlet was across the dry land of all
the charts then published, and the _Idaho_ was aground in the woods
according to the authorized maps.
This Idaho Inlet, as it is now put down, is the sportsman’s long-sought
paradise. The stewards, who went ashore with the tank-boats for fresh
water, startled seven deer as they pushed their way to the foot of a
cascade, and the young men who went off in an Indian canoe caught
thirteen large salmon with their inexperienced spearing. Mr. Wallace,
the first officer, took a party off in the ship’s small boats, and we
swept gayly up the inlet, over waters where the salmon and flounders
could be seen darting in schools through the water and just escaping the
strokes of the oar. At the mouth of the creek at the head of the inlet,
the freshening current was alive with fish, and some of the energetic
ones landed there, and, pushing ahead for exploration, were soon lost to
sight in the high grass and the underbrush that fringed the forest. It
began to rain about that time, and a dripping group remained by the
boats, watching the rainbow fish playing in the waters, and enjoying the
dry Scotch humor of the officer, who had led us off on this water
picnic. Clouds rolled over our snow-capped mountain and blurred the
landscape, and after an hour of quietly sitting in the rain, even the
amphibious Scot began to wish, too, that the wanderers would return,
lest the falling tide should leave us on the wrong side of the shallows
at the mouth of the creek. As he took a less humorous view of the
situation, all the rest joined in the strain and began to berate the
Alaska climate with its constant downpour. Some one was impelled to ask
the genial Scotchman if it was really true that the summit of Ben Nevis
is never seen oftener than twice a year. He nearly upset the boat to
refute that slander, and his emphatic “No!” may be still ringing and
echoing around the north end of Chicagoff Island.
After the first officer had returned his boatloads of damp but
enthusiastic passengers to the ship, the stories of fish, and boasts of
the great bear-tracks seen on shore, disturbed the tranquillity of the
anchorage. The captain of the ship took his rifle and was rowed away to
shallow waters, where he shot a salmon, waded in, and threw it ashore.
While wandering along after the huge bear-tracks, that were twelve
inches long by affidavit measure, he saw an eagle flying off with his
salmon, and another fine shot laid the bird of freedom low. When the
captain returned to the ship he threw the eagle and the salmon on deck,
and at the size of the former every one marvelled. The outspread wings
measured the traditional six feet from tip to tip, and the beak, the
claws, and the stiff feathers were rapidly seized upon as trophies and
souvenirs of the day. A broad, double rainbow arched over us as we left
the lovely niche between the mountains in the evening, and then we swept
back to Icy Straits and started out to the open ocean, and down the
coast to Sitka, having a glimpse, on the way, of the vast glacier at the
head of Taylor Bay, that Vancouver and his men visited while his ships
lay at anchor in Port Althorp, just west of our Idaho Inlet.